Includes bibliographical references (p. [455]-457) and index

"We can run from each other, but we cannot escape each other. Knock down the fences that divide. Tear apart the walls that imprison. Reach out: freedom lies just on the other side." Those are the vibrant words of Thurgood Marshall - legendary civil rights lawyer, solicitor general of the United States, the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court. And here, at last, is the first major biography of Justice Marshall. Written by the prize-winning author Carl T. Rowan, in intimate anecdotes and an impassioned voice, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall presents an incisive portrait of the extraordinary life and career of this great figure who came to be known as "Mr. Civil Rights."

With unprecedented access to hundreds of closed files of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, drawing upon countless conversations with Marshall over their forty-year friendship as well as exclusive interviews with him, Rowan chronicles Thurgood Marshall's reckless early years in Jim Crow Baltimore, his triumphs with the NAACP as the nation's most renowned civil rights lawyer - Marshall changed America by winning the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school segregation case in 1954 - and his stormy twenty-four-year tenure as a United States Supreme Court justice

Dream Makers, Dream Breakers also contains sharply etched and sometimes angry portraits of the prominent Americans who dominated the world in which Marshall worked and fought. The "dream makers" include Earl Warren, Harry Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt; the "dream breakers," George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon, and George Bush. Marshall also speaks about his colleagues on the Supreme Court, and rates the presidents, putting Truman at the top and Reagan "at the bottom, the very bottom." Dream Makers, Dream Breakers is a riveting, absorbing portrait of Thurgood Marshall, a great man who has made America a better society

Changing "the American way of life" -- The making of a man -- The early years -- Revenge: then a national crusade -- Warfare among NAACP blacks -- A black agenda emerges -- Triple murder -- Race wars -- Winning the right to vote -- "Lady Big Heart" -- Arming blacks with trained intelligence -- Soldier troubles -- A destructive marriage -- Jim Crow's last stand? -- Sudden death -- Dream breaker George Wallace -- Marshall the jurist: and his nemesis -- The court: and its nonviolent revolution -- Mr. Justice Marshall's role -- A nation of men, not laws -- Marshall with and without law clerks -- Disillusionment and retirement -- The Clarence Thomas fiasco -- Measuring Marshall without sentiment

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